The present application claims the benefit of a Japanese Patent Application No.2000-094959 filed Mar. 30, 2000, in the Japanese Patent Office, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to character recognition methods and storage media, and more particularly to a character recognition method which uses a function for recognizing a single character and a function for recognizing a character string by appropriately extracting and recognizing a contacting character, a separated character and the like, and to a computer-readable storage medium which stores a program for causing a computer to carry out a character recognition by such a character recognition method. For example, the present invention is applied to a recognition of a character string made up of a plurality of lines, and a recognition of a character string which takes into account a contacting rule or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a conventional method of recognizing a character string, there is a word reading method proposed in a Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No.5-233877, for example. According to this proposed character recognition method, the character is extracted by a plurality of extracting methods, so that a correct character pattern is obtained even if the character has considerable separations or contacts.
When extracting the character according to the proposed character recognition method, data of a peripheral distribution of a character string pattern and data of a circumscribing rectangle are used. In other words, the rectangle is divided vertically based on the peripheral distribution. In addition, according to the proposed character recognition method, a direct access is made to image data in order to process a character candidate.
In closely adjacent characters or contacting characters of a character string, there are portions which cannot be mutually separated rectangularly or cannot be mutually separated linearly. According to the proposed character recognition method described above, the character recognition process is carried out in units of rectangles, even with respect to the closely adjacent characters and the contacting characters of the character string, and thus, there is a limit to improving the recognition accuracy.
In addition, an increase in the processing time required to carry out the character recognition process is unavoidable, because the direct access must be made to the image data.